Can I use more than 1 computer to transcode a video file using ffmpeg at the same time? or is there any free software on ubuntu that allows such a thing? i have ubuntu 18.04 32 bit running on my laptop.

So if i get another laptop (say running the same ubuntu version) would such a thing be possible?

Haven't tried it, but first thing google throws at me when searching for "distributed encoding ffmpeg" is https://github.com/nergdron/dve and there are other results which look like they might do what you want.
-> did you try any of them?

You can tweak the codecs that ffmpeg uses or leave it as-is. You need 2 or more systems running Linux with ffmpeg installed. The system with the script should have access to the other ones, so you should run ssh-keygen first on all of the systems and then on the system with the script, run ssh-copy-id [server] from the system with the script against all other systems. Be sure to replace [server] with the server name of the other systems.

Update the "SERVERS" variable in the script with the names of the servers that will be processing the video.
Use the script to run a benchmark and it will automatically figure out how to divide the load so that your file is processed in the fastest way possible.

If the processors are equal, then the 2nd node will cut your processing time in half.

When all is done, you have to join the fragments by running the script with the join command.